


Numb without you

by Fearless_leaderr



Series: The Spooky brothers [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics), The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Canonical Character Death, Drug Use, Kinda just bending plot to suit my own agenda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-10-31 23:17:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17858891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fearless_leaderr/pseuds/Fearless_leaderr
Summary: Father puts a statue up in the courtyard, bronze immortalising a boy forever. Ben would hate it.“I hate it,” Ben says from beside him, crossing his arms across his chest.





	Numb without you

**Author's Note:**

> I watched the Umbrella Academy over the weekend and just had to write about Klaus and Ben because I have so many feelings about my favourite spooky duo. It's currently 4am and I don't even know if this is coherent but fuck it, spooky boys.
> 
> This is was littered with mistakes lmao soz. All fixed now I think.

Dad reports a mission for them on a sunny day in April. It’s nothing special; hostage situation in a bank downtown. Not overly dangerous or exciting, so one wants to take it. They’re all freshly nineteen, and the end of ‘The Umbrella Academy’ as they know it is coming. Everyone has felt the shift.

Diego is always brimming with a low, simmering rage. He would much rather work on his own as some detective-vigilante hybrid. He selects his own missions now. 

Allison is an up and coming Hollywood star. She has no time to even be entertaining anything so dangerous which could affect her chance of getting roles.

Five is gone.

Luther is still daddies little solider but has been glued to Allison’s hip as of late. This is following her announced that she’s moving to Hollywood, like following her about could possibly convince her to stay. 

Vanya is Vanya.

As for Klaus, he hasn’t been asked to go on a mission since he was seventeen. Which is completely fine by him. Not going on mission’s means he can stay as high as he wants, unchecked and unbothered by his father. At this stage the man has pretty much given up, only communicating with Klaus when he wants to convey how much of a disappointment he is. Nothing like the support of your father to get you through hard times. He looks around at his siblings, who have all of a sudden became fascinated by the floor. He rolls his eyes.

The only person this leaves left is Ben, who sighs so loudly in response their father scowls. The teenagers face colours immediately at the blatant disregard and he straightens up, trying to plaster a more enthusiastic smile onto his face.

“Fine. I’ll go,” he adds politely, standing up and traipsing out after their father. Once he gets to the door he turns back, sticking his middle finger up. None of their siblings noticed, having gone back to what they were doing before father so rudely asked them to save lives.

Klaus noticed. Klaus always notices Ben. He sticks his tongue out in response.

“Asshole.” Mouths Ben. 

“Goody two shoes.” Mouths Klaus. 

Ben laughs, then he’s gone. 

•••

They’re all sitting at the dining room table. Over the years it’s became somewhat of a tradition, that whilst someone is out on individual mission they all sit at the table and wait for said person to get back. Diego sharpens his knifes. Allison and Luther play cards. Vanya reads. Klaus smokes. Even though the team is splitting up, and whilst it’s obvious that they don’t even like each other, they’re still siblings. And siblings make sure their own are safe. 

He’s just finishing lighting a blunt as a means of his own entainment when he becomes aware of a presence in the room which hadn’t been there moments ago. He looks up then, starting slightly when he catches the sight of dear old number six. He hadn’t even heard him come in, and apparently neither has anyone else. 

“Oh, hey Benny Ben Ben. How was your mission?” Klaus asks, propping his chin up with the heel of his hand. He takes a long drag of his joint, observing his brother for a moment (or what he can see of him). Ben is standing facing the wall, his shoulders tensed. They’re coiled in on themselves like he’s waiting for an impending attack, and Klaus is sure he catches a glimpse of red on the back of the black suit when he looks close enough. Wait, is it torn?

“Ben?” He asks again, more hesitantly this time.

Ben still doesn’t turn to face him. He laughs nervously, feigning mock insult and turns to his other siblings at the table to gauge their reaction at number sixes weird display. They’re all staring at him. Allison and Luther both exchange a long and significant look before turning back to him, their eyebrows raising simultaneously like they’ve practiced at it. Diego scrunches his nose up and tuts, but he’s also eyeing him critically. Somehow none of their reactions are surprising, but it’s Vanya’s face that gets him.

She stares at him, wide eyed and pale, looking between Klaus and Ben like she’s trying hard to understand something crucial. She swallows then, turns back to him and he swears, he’s never seen a more hesitantly fearful look in his life. Klaus is so struck to the core with what that look can possibly mean he grounds his cigarette out slowly, turning back to Ben to ask what the hell is rattling their sister so bad. But when his gaze falls to the spot his brother was just standing in, there’s no one there. No one there at all. It’s as if he was seeing a…

Oh. Oh no. No. No. No.

He stands, his chair clattering to the floor behind him. His heart is hammering against his rib cage, more severely than any drugs he’s ever consumed had made it. Like a puppet on strings he stumbles over to where Ben stood a moment ago, a thin sheen of sweat beginning to develop on his forehead. His hands are clamy. He wipes them on his trousers. He’s high sure, but not high enough to imagine a whole human being. 

Behind him he is aware of everyone else rising from their seats. Klaus can hear the frantic whispering beginning to fall from everyone’s mouths. The atmosphere in the room which had just been festering boredom and quiet discontent has fallen way to a new kind; panic and confusion. Its suffocating him, grasping him by the throat and making his chest so tight it’s difficult to breathe. It had to be a mistake, right? He’s just worried about his brother, so his consciousness has projected a version of him to calm him down. Right? Right?!

“Klaus?” Vanya asks behind him, softly like she’s afraid to speak. Vanya’s voice is always shy of being a whisper; he guesses being told to be silent all the time would do that to a person. This time however the tone of her voice is different. It’s like she’s approaching a wounded animal whilst somehow simultaneously being terrified herself. It makes the hairs on his arm stand on end and he turns to face her slowly, his eyes wide.

Everyone’s eyes are wide. They stare at each other assessingly before Luther steps forward. Always the leader, Luther.

“Klaus. Are you sure you saw Ben?”

He looks back at the others, and a silent conversation he’s not privvy to happens.

“Could it maybe have been a hallucination or something. I mean, you’re high aren’t you?” He asks slowly, with as much tact as his dads golden boy could possibly have: next to nothing. 

Klaus sighs at that, crossing his arms over his chest. He can feel his heart beating against his wrist.

“I….” A pause. He looks back at the spot. It’s still empty. Maybe...Maybe he took a bad batch, that is actually having worse effects than he’s aware of. Perhaps it was a hallucination. He looks at his siblings. They’re nodding at him encouragingly, like they want to believe it as well. Minus Vanya, who has apparently slipped out the room sometime between Luther talking to him and his eon long time to mull it over. No one else will have noticed. Ben will be home any minute now. His favourite brother, always the most patient with him. He can’t bare the alternative. 

“Yeah, maybe.” He concludes.

***

Ben does come home that night.

There is not a single inch of him that’s not covered in blood. When Klaus rushes forward to check, because he needs to check, Pogo materialises out of nowhere and stops him in his tracks. He is saying something, but Klaus can’t hear. He can’t hear anything but blood pounding in his ears.

He continues pushing forward anyway. His brother’s skin is slippery and cold. There’s a gaping hole in his chest, like the creature inside him has vacated. Or been cut out. His eyes are open wide and blank, like he died unexpectedly. His father is there, barking orders at mother to fix him. He hasn’t sounded so angry since five dissapeared. Mother is repeatedly insisting that there is nothing she can do. Someone behind him is crying. Someone is punching the wall. Someone in sniffling. 

Klaus lets go.

He looks down as his hands. They’re covered in Ben’s blood. It still feel’s warm, he didn’t die that long ago. 

He walks to his room, shuts the door.

He screams until his voice gives out.

***

Ben’s funeral comes and goes. Not that Klaus remembers very much of it. He’s spent the last week living in a constant cycle of drug consuming and drinking until he can’t function. 

The pain he feels is indescribable. Out of the lot of them, he was always the closest to Ben. It was a natural progression; they both had the weird powers which made everyone else uncomfortable. They never made each other uncomfortable. In fact, Ben was the only one who was willing to understand why he had started taken drugs in the first place: to silence the voices that were constantly screaming out. The mausoleum haunted him every waking moment of the day. He is afraid of the dark. He is afraid of small spaces. He is still scared of the dead.

Ben didn’t roll his eyes when he drank too much. Ben would help him into bed, leaving a glass of water on his bedside table. 

Ben didn’t look at him in disgust when he had a bad trip. He’d hold him close, gently stroking his hair until he sobered up and registered the gesture.

Ben was his best friend.

Now he’s gone, and he’s taken Klaus’s last shred of childhood innocence with him.

*** 

Father puts a statue up in the courtyard, bronze immortalising a boy forever. Ben would hate it.

“I hate it,” Ben says from beside him, crossing his arms across his chest.

The voice comes so unexpectedly that Klaus jumps about a foot into the air, his heart beginning to beat wildly. He’s not exactly high at the moment so it’s eniterly within the realm of possibility that this could indeed be his dear deceased brother talking to him. That’s not what scares him, for the first time in his life. What scares him is if that when he turns, there is no one there. He doesn’t think he could handle the crushing disappointment. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He feels ill with dread.

He turns his head to the left. He pauses. He opens his eyes.

Ben smiles softly at him. There is not a single drop of blood on him. In fact, he looks like he did on the morning of that mission; leather jacket, hoodie, jeans. He looks how he always did. And perhaps he isn’t alive, and perhaps Klaus is hallucinating, but that doesn’t matter at the moment because he’s here. He’s here, with him, and he’d be damned if he was ever going to let him go again.

“I hate it,” Ben repeats.

“I know,” Klaus replies, his face splitting into a watery smile.


End file.
